“It hasn’t been productive in the debate, and it hasn’t helped him,” Skelly says. Here was one of the top scientists in his field, provoking one of the world’s largest agrichemical companies with crude sexual innuendos and LL Cool J-inspired raps:īattle anybody, i don’t care who you tell When a batch of these emails became public in 2010, Hayes’ supporters and critics alike were stunned. Company reps trail him from one speaking engagement to the next Hayes, in turn, bombards Syngenta with a steady flow of emails laced with profane verses, academic taunts, and even accounts of his dreams. Yet over the years, Hayes has become engaged in a remarkably antagonistic sort of symbiosis with Syngenta. “And he’s become the personality associated with this issue because he’s a remarkable person.” “He’s a remarkable person,” says David Skelly, a Yale ecologist who has served on two of the advisory panels that help the EPA vet atrazine research. Without him, atrazine might not be undergoing its third Environmental Protection Agency review in less than a decade, and Syngenta, the chemical’s Swiss manufacturer, might not be facing lawsuits in state and federal courts by plaintiffs from 40 Midwestern water districts who claim atrazine has contaminated their drinking water.
And while scores of researchers have described atrazine’s worrisome effects, it is Hayes’ knack for drama that has brought attention to the problem. He has been the subject of a children’s book ( The Frog Scientist), travels the world giving lectures, and by his estimate has appeared in a dozen documentaries. “But if they’re reproductively impaired, that’s killing the population.”Īll of this has earned Hayes something approaching rock-star status. “Atrazine isn’t killing the frogs,” Hayes explains. To be sure, he publishes in all the right journals and presents his work at the key scientific meetings, but he has also spearheaded a public outcry against atrazine, testifying at government hearings, appearing in all forms of media, and even launching, an anti-atrazine website. And most scientists, upon discovering that trace amounts of one of the nation’s top-selling herbicides cause gender-bending abnormalities in frogs, would have been content to publish their results and let the regulators and manufacturers fight it out.īut Hayes is not like other scientists.
The pool of endocrinologists and herpetologists who might casually mention lunching on homemade raccoon curry is also minuscule. You will find few other faculty members who keep their money and identification in a child’s Spider-Man sock rather than a wallet, or run their daily 12-mile commute, or compose raps about their research and perform them at scientific meetings. Hayes is a 5-foot-3 fireplug of a man with a gentle voice and an easy grin who favors black suits when he’s on the lecture circuit and sweatshirts and running shorts the rest of the time. “He still has ovaries, but there’s no eggs in them,” Hayes told me the next day as we stood watching the frog, who swam over and inspected us soberly, then turned and flopped away. Hayes opened him up to take a look, Darnell’s insides were still female. But last March, when UC-Berkeley integrative biology professor Tyrone B. Recently he was moved to an atrazine-free tank and has turned lanky, losing the plump, pincushion look of a female frog. He is also the mother of his children, having successfully mated with other males and spawned clutches of eggs. But after being raised in water contaminated with the herbicide atrazine at a level of 2.5 parts per billion-slightly less than what’s allowed in our drinking water-he developed a female body, inside and out. There is, however, one unusual thing about Darnell. He’s a good breeder, too, having produced both children and grandchildren. Like most of his species, he’s hardy and long-lived, an adept swimmer, a poor crawler, and a voracious eater. He is an African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis, sometimes called the lab rat of amphibians.
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Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.ĭarnell lives deep in the basement of a life sciences building at the University of California-Berkeley, in a plastic tub on a row of stainless steel shelves.
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